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Hostpoint blog: News, tips and hints about web hosting and more

Our daily efforts in pursuit of innovation

There have always been many good reasons to host websites and e-mails on Hostpoint. But innovative services and a secure, stable infrastructure like the one we operate don’t appear out of thin air. On the contrary: only a dedicated development effort, a staff made up of proven experts and regular investments running into the millions enable us to offer world-class web hosting while ensuring that your website is one of the fastest around – and available around the clock. The past few months have seen some developments that we’re excited to share with you.

State-of-the-art servers – to really get things going
How do we achieve high speed and high reliability? For starters, through fast, new high-speed servers with which we have replaced our entire server farm over the past few months. And because “new” doesn’t always mean “better”, we only run first-class, brand-name servers – with high-performance CPUs from Intel and plenty of RAM. But that’s not all: to ensure lag-free loading of content stored in databases, we use an all-flash storage solution for databases. After all, flash storage offers even faster access times than conventional hard disks. Of course, we still need high-availability storage space in order to safely host thousands of websites and e-mail accounts. Here again, we use additional flash accelerators (SSD) to provide a massive boost to website access speed. So you can enjoy consistent I/O values and low latency for your website and databases.

Your storage is completely at your disposal
The web storage space provided by all of our web hosting packages is fully available for your website content. So if you run an online shop with numerous products, work with films and large image files and want to consistently add new content to your website, you can rest assured that you won’t run out of web storage space anytime soon.

And independently of that, you have an unlimited number of mailboxes with 5 GB of memory each at your disposal. The storage space used for e-mails is not factored into your web storage quota.

Swissness and security are top priorities
We run our own server farm in a data center at a secure location near Zurich – naturally physically protected and under surveillance around the clock, with redundant, physically separated and identical storage clusters so that in the unlikely event of an interruption in service, every single website will remain as quickly accessible as you are accustomed to expect from Hostpoint. And because only the most secure solution is good enough for our customers, the data center has been certified by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA (FINMA-RS-08/7 Outsourcing banks) and fulfills quality standard ISO-27001.
We’re also prepared for any possibility in the event of electronic attacks: our entire infrastructure is effectively protected against DDoS attacks. This helps us reduce the risk of your website going offline for an extended period due to an attack.

But you can also do something to enhance your security. We make it easy for you and offer free SSL certificates from Symantec so that the data on your website (as well as the queries from your website visitors) are transmitted in encrypted form. That generates trust – and Google rewards your security with better rankings.

And then there’s this: we take hourly snapshots of all web, mail and MySQL data and store them for 24 hours. So if you unintentionally change or delete data, the changes can be traced back and restored for up to a day. This can be extremely practical, for example, when you’ve been working on something all day and inadvertently delete your data late in the afternoon. What’s more, we also create complete web, e-mail and database backups several times a day. The data – backed-up in Switzerland, of course – is available to you for 30, 90 or even up to 180 days depending on the web hosting package you’ve purchased.

Continuous investment
Year in and year out, we invest large sums in expanding and continuously updating our infrastructure. That includes first-class, brand-name hardware for servers, routers and storage systems, the expansion of our multi-level caching with plenty of extra RAM, an all-flash storage system for databases and a new storage cluster with SSD acceleration. And because we retain control of our own infrastructure, we employ specially trained employees for the development and maintenance of our data center.

And now a bit more tech-talk to round things out. For the cognoscenti

We’re upping the power: to maintain the performance of our web hosting platform at all times, we separate all services and utilize load-balancing systems for particularly resource-intensive services.

Support and advice is all-inclusive
Every second employee at Hostpoint is in direct contact with customers and helps ensure that most calls are handled within two minutes. E-mail queries are also answered very quickly. Time is money, after all, which is why our employees are at your service even on weekends and holidays, 365 days a year, to provide the assistance you need. And just to make sure that they’re prepared to go the extra mile with you, we hold regular training courses to keep our employees up to speed with the latest technical developments. So you can continue to enjoy the personal service and attentive and clear consultations that you’ve come to expect from us.

Our daily efforts in pursuit of innovation

Thomas Brühwiler

Thomas Brühwiler is Hostpoint's Head of Communication and also responsible for all activities in the social media field. He was already typing on a Commodore 64 in his very young years – he used to copy pages of BASIC code from magazines. Often he had to accept that the program didn’t run because an error had sneaked into the jumble of characters. Today he cannot imagine his life without computers, in spite of those experiences.

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